Hindustan Unilever has agreed to acquire beauty startup Minimalist for about $342 million, marking its latest push to expand in India’s fast-growing premium skincare market. The consumer goods giant will initially acquire a 90.5% stake in the four-year-old direct-to-consumer brand through secondary buyouts and primary investment, with the remaining 9.5% to be purchased from founders […]

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Indian fintech Jar has turned cash flow positive, an executive at the Tiger Global-backed startup confirmed on Wednesday. The three-year-old startup, which offers savings and investment services to consumers, achieved the milestone while still growing by more than 10 times last year, according to an investor note seen by TechCrunch. The profitability push comes as […]

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Zomato’s quick-commerce business, Blinkit, is accelerating its expansion in India, but it expects losses to continue piling up as competition intensifies in India’s instant delivery market. Blinkit now aims to have up to 2,000 dark stores (small warehouses in residential areas that exclusively service online orders), a year ahead of its previous forecast. The company […]

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Apple launched its dedicated Apple Store app in India on Friday, deepening its retail presence in the world’s most populous country as the iPhone maker seeks to capitalize on growing consumer demand. The app, available for download on India’s App Store, lets customers purchase Apple products directly while receiving personalized shopping recommendations, the company said […]

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Amazon has agreed to acquire Indian buy-now, pay-later startup Axio, deepening its push into financial services in one of its fastest-growing markets. The e-commerce group, which has held an equity stake in Axio for six years, signed the acquisition agreement in December after completing due diligence, the Indian startup said in a blog post. Financial […]

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Former SoftBank exec Akshay Naheta's startup, Distributed Technologies Research, is trying to bridge the gap between banking and blockchain tech.

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A joint international statement provides the first official confirmation that North Korea was behind the $235M hack of WazirX, India's largest cryptocurrency exchange.

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Groww, India’s largest retail stockbroker, is preparing to file for an IPO in 10 to 12 months, seeking a valuation between $6 billion and $8 billion, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The Bengaluru-headquartered’s listing would be the first IPO by a digital trading platform in India. The targeted valuation is more than double […]

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As digital payments morph into strategic assets, India is offering a template for other nations seeking to reduce dependence on Western payment networks. Regulators around the world are notching up scrutiny on Visa and Mastercard over the fees they charge merchants, but India has chosen a different path: creating rival payment networks that are increasingly […]

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VLC media player, the popular open-source software developed by nonprofit VideoLAN, has topped 6 billion downloads worldwide and teased an AI-powered subtitle system. The new feature automatically generates real-time subtitles — which can then also be translated in many languages — for any video using open-source AI models that run locally on users’ devices, eliminating […]

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Flipkart has hired Kabeer Biswas, the co-founder of Indian delivery startup Dunzo, as the Walmart-owned e-commerce group expands its quick-commerce business in the country. Biswas will lead Flipkart’s quick commerce effort, called Flipkart Minutes, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The move comes nearly a year after Flipkart was considering a potential acquisition […]

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Microsoft announced a sweeping series of artificial intelligence partnerships across India’s core sectors on Wednesday, a day after pledging to invest $3 billion in the country over the next two years as it intensifies competition with rivals Google and Amazon. The tech giant’s chief executive Satya Nadella (pictured above) unveiled agreements with five major organizations […]

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Microsoft plans to invest $3 billion to expand its artificial intelligence and cloud services in India. The firm, which has been operating in India for more than two decades, will also train an additional 10 million people in the country with AI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event in Bengaluru on Tuesday. “The […]

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Accel has maintained its India fund size at $650 million for its eighth vehicle, even as other venture firms in the region are racing to raise increasingly larger pools of capital. The firm had ample opportunity to raise “multi-billion dollars,” said Shekhar Kirani, partner at Accel, in an interview with TechCrunch. But unlike peers who […]

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Consumer goods giant Hindustan Unilever is in advanced talks to acquire 4-year-old direct-to-consumer startup Minimalist for up to $350 million, according to two people familiar with the matter. An acquisition would add to the Unilever subsidiary’s buying spree in India, where it expanded into the health and well-being category by acquiring Oziva and Wellbeing Nutrition […]

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More than half a dozen VPN apps, including Cloudflare’s widely used 1.1.1.1, have been pulled from India’s Apple App Store and Google Play Store following intervention from government authorities, TechCrunch has learned.  The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs issued removal orders for the apps, according to a document reviewed by TechCrunch and a disclosure made […]

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Accel has raised $650 million for its eighth India fund as the U.S. venture firm expands its investment strategy in the South Asian market. The new fund follows the firm’s seventh India fund secured in March 2022. Accel — which has backed companies including e-commerce group Flipkart, food delivery platform Swiggy, and software group Freshworks […]

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India has once again pushed back a contentious plan to limit major technology companies’ control of the nation’s digital payments system, extending a regulatory uncertainty that has weighed on the sector for years. The National Payments Corporation of India said on Tuesday it would extend the deadline for implementing a 30% cap on any individual […]

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India has removed restrictions on WhatsApp’s payments service in a significant victory for Meta in its largest market by users as the social media giant seeks to compete with entrenched fintech rivals. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the payments body overseeing the popular instant payments rail called UPI, said Tuesday that WhatsApp can […]

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Asset management firm Fidelity slashed the estimated worth of its stake in business messaging platform Gupshup by another 7.7% last month, lowering the value of its holding in the SaaS startup by a total of more than 65% since its investment in mid-2021. One of the funds operated by the U.S. asset manager valued its […]

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